Karoline Hausted first began playing the piano at age six, and has since woven together influences from jazz and classical to world / folk music to synth-pop. Her four solo albums echo a variety of expression from minimalistic and acoustic flavors to tracks that have a more electronic and atmospheric feel.

Karoline typically records most of her songs on her own, playing keyboards, beats and singing, before turning to collaboration with musicians and sound engineers, often across borders.

Since her solo debut, Double Silence (2009), she has traveled the world and lived in various places while recording and releasing three albums, Drawings (2010), Jeg tror jeg drømmer (2012) and Echoes (2013). Jeg tror jeg drømmer, featuring songs in her native Danish, earned her nominations for the Danish Music Award's ”Track of the Year,” and for The GAFFA Award for ”Female Artist of the Year”.

Since 2011, Karoline has called California home.

Karoline’s songs come out of years of honing a universe of subtle melancholy. The hushed and dreamy quality which runs through the music is not accidental. Hausted’s expression is in a vein much like that of a modern Stina Nordenstamm or acoustic Kate Bush, fueled by an inner necessity, where intimacy, subtleness, and scarcity of production add up to a very loud whispery cry that seems to stem from somewhere within the singer’s very soul. Maybe through these performances we come as close to just that as we possibly can, and this is why the impact is as powerful as it is. Rather than insist on getting the listener's attention, Karoline instead trusts that one can navigate themselves to where the neck hairs stand up straight.

“Once again a very special tone and mood ... blissfully impossible to put into any genre box"

-Pelle Sonne Lohmann, GAFFA Music Magazine.

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“Dreamlike, magnificent, magic, fragile and subtle”- Sabine De Greef, With Music In My Mind

“A voice that can melt the darkest of hearts…”- Music From Another Surface

“Haunted… Breezy melodies that float slowly across the room, never pushy, and leaving the listener to his imagination, sometimes so much so that just the moments of silence and the sound that was not played particularly stimulates the imagination.”- Ariane Seelaff, White Tapes

“ … an absolutely gorgeous track from Danish songwriter Karoline Hausted… I don’t understand one word she says, but that doesn’t mean a thing. This is some beautiful stuff.”– ObscureSound.com.

- Klaus Lynggard, Information has written about Karolines Danish songs that: "... Here is something as rare as an original artistic temperament at play. Hushed, special and urgent, she is addictive as drugs and completely impossible to get out of the system."

"The well-written lyrics center on longings and dreams, often in the form of small dense storytelling ... Double Silence does not yell out loud, but deserves to be heard." -Ole Rosenstand Svidt from GAFFA about ' Double Silence. '

And Ivan Rod from Gaffa had the following unequivocal message:"Denmark has with Karoline Hausted obviously gotten itself a child prodigy in the singer / songwriter tradition."

Live Dates

To Wake You Live Montage

Video - Where The Day Went

Video - To Wake You on "What Is It?"

Listen to the single "What Is It?"

Reviews

“Where The Day Went” is an outlier in modern collections of music which represent the unfathomable pace of globalization. Stitching together a quiet reflection, To Wake You capture their truly abstract form within the cinematography of the piece.

The song itself is a peacefully crafted candidate for exploring how time can so easily slip away. Any perceived vagueness ought to be swept aside, and instead taken as a prompt to seek the deeper significance of their creation.

While some listeners may find it challenging to engage with, the philosophical nature of Mark and Karoline’s musical collaborations invite an appreciation of finer details. As a standalone introduction to the duo’s talents, excitement should be a natural response to how close we are to the release of Beauty In The Smallest Things — whose title only compounds those observations. 4.5/5.

"You’re going to have listen to To Wake You’s “What Is It?” and “To Wake You” back-to-back to fully appreciate their poetry. That’s not to say the singles aren’t great individually, but the full effect is felt with both playing immediately after each other.(...) The first one is more light-hearted lyrically and in tone, with Hausted’s vocals full of unrestrained hope, curiosity, and sincerity. The flipside is Davis’ “To Wake You” single, which is darker, slightly more sensual, and hauntingly beautiful. If “What Is It?” is the start of a relationship, full of wonder and almost child-like optimism, always questioning, like the title suggests, then “To Wake You” is the answer to those questions, ones we might not always want to know the answer to. And I kind of love both of them a lot."

"The reason you shouldn’t listen to something just once and then dismiss it is because you may miss out on gems such as To Wake You – “Not Gonna Fall". A sparse and sprawling track of seemingly hopeful love, quiet positivity or perhaps perseverance most likely all three.

To Wake You’s Karoline Hausted and Mark Davis certainly conjure up romantic dreams of fabled The Swell Season and this is that feeling of comfortable vs. uncertainty meets you canthat makes this track swell for all seasons forward moving romantics."

“…It was at Esalen that I had the great pleasure of hearing To Wake You in Concert a couple of months ago (…) If you ever get a chance to hear them live -- together as To Wake You or solo -- jump at it. I promise you'll be glad you did.”